Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

We have spent some time debating the specifics of Clause 494, and I shall not repeat all that material. The purpose of this stand part debate is to discuss whether it is appropriate to have an auditor-specific offence in the Bill at all. It is my contention that it is not. I have already said that I do not believe there is any evidence of a problem that would require this offence. But, to the extent that fraud or dishonesty is involved in auditing, I believe that it can be dealt with by the existing criminal law, including the current Fraud Bill, which is at this moment being debated in the Chamber. If the Government do not believe that the existing and planned criminal offences cover the kind of problems that they believe auditors present, I invite them to set out precisely why that is. Is the general law not sufficiently clear to deal with the problems that the Government believe exist? We need to narrow down specifically what auditors do that require an auditor-specific offence. We should, as legislators, be very wary of creating legislation for criminal offences for particular professions. I believe that this legislation is unprecedented. For example, despite the considerable dangers that doctors and nurses can present to the public—far more dangerous, I suggest, than the odd negligent auditor—there are no specific offences for the medical profession. Society relies on the general criminal law and the medical profession’s own disciplinary arrangements. I invite the Government to give an example of a profession that has been singled out for treatment under the criminal law in the way that auditors have been singled out. Alternatively, can the Government give policy reasons why doctors and nurses are treated in one way but auditors are to be treated in another? We can argue about the wording, as we did in the previous group of amendments, but the real problem is that there is no clearly made case for the Bill to create the offence at all.